


Joy Celestial

by BlackOpal



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, M/M, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-28
Updated: 2012-09-28
Packaged: 2017-11-15 04:51:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackOpal/pseuds/BlackOpal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Castiel make their way through Purgatory, a horrifying and unearthly place that pulls them apart. Slight Divine Comedy infusion. Pre-Dean/Cas</p>
<p>    “I think about sin all the time,” Dean replies tartly, lids heavy. He can feel Castiel lick his lips. He can taste the salt. He can hear him shift.</p>
<p>    Senses blend here. Things he shouldn’t know, he knows. Things he should remember, he doesn’t. It’s a sharply focused awareness that shifts and changes with the days.</p>
<p>    “You think about sinning,” Cas corrects, “do you think about sin?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Joy Celestial

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first official foray into the Supernatural fandom. I had a small bit of Dantesque inspiration for this, because the fact that Purgatory was "monster hell" always annoyed me a tad. So it's a bit of an odd fic.
> 
> Reviews are lovely, even haters.

“Do you ever think about sin?”

The husk in Cas’ voice grates across the silence. Dean stretches against the leaves, feeling the dig of three separate roots push into his spine, and smells the damp-musk, the not-quite-familiar smell of the forest, present, but with something lingering under it. A smell like disinfectant. Unearthly.

“I think about sin all the time,” Dean replies tartly, lids heavy. He can feel Castiel lick his lips. He can taste the salt. He can hear him shift.

Senses blend here. Things he shouldn’t know, he knows. Things he should remember, he doesn’t. It’s a sharply focused awareness that shifts and changes with the days.

“You think about sinning,” Cas corrects, “do you think about sin?”

And, as it seems to be here, Dean can feel the heaviness in Cas’ stomach, and the tension in his throat.

“Do you mean... do you mean what sin is?” Dean asked.

“And what it does to you,” Cas answered.

“I’ve never thought I owed anyone anything,” Dean replies, “and I don’t play by the rules of an absent god.”

Cas thinks he’s lying. It’s a thought that’s part knowledge and part hope. In this place, Dean can see what Cas wants him to be.

“Even yourself?”

“Huh?”

“You don’t even owe yourself anything?”

Dean hears scuttering in the distance. His lids are heavy. His limbs are rock.

They can’t die here. Not as far as he can tell. But it isn’t pleasant, when they’re caught. It isn’t fun.

He remembers the first day, and Castiel’s blood pumping into his palm. Bubbling out of his mouth. His own breath coming fast and hard and everything was over.

“I’ve sinned, Dean.”

“You fucked up. I’ve done it myself.”

“It’s more than that.”

And he wants to tell Cas to sleep. To let him sleep. But this is important to Cas, so here it is important to him. Here, where he can be pulled into Cas’ way of thinking, infinite loops of nonlinear ideas and childish marvel. Into faith and hope and disgust. He is both exhausted and incapable of sleep.

There are other things, too. Other times when it isn’t just Cas he’s feeling. There are times when Dean feels hungry things, and angry things. There are times when the things Dean feels aren’t him, and aren’t Cas.

“I’ve destroyed myself,” Cas says, and Dean doesn’t disagree. Cas can sense it in him.

 

***

There are monsters in the dark.

There was a time when Cas thought that nothing that came from God was truly monstrous. The crisp, clarity of naivety granted him that privilege. But there are monsters here. Cas can’t deny that. Even when they’re gone, he can feel them under his skin, pushing past his ribcage, worming into his heart.

And they want. Oh god do they want. They crave flesh and blood in a place that doesn’t provide it. Worse, they crave the feeling of cutting into flesh, the satisfaction of the catch. They crave domination.

There’s a succubus in the woods that will cut your throat when you come. Cas can feel her joy when the newborns emerge, scaled and starving. There’s a parasite that curls itself around your frontal lobe, and every time anything goes wrong you get a little bit angrier, and a little bit more violent. Cas can feel the breaking of your best friend’s cheekbone. There’s a shapeshifter that takes your best part of you, pulls it from your body. He keeps it, and you are left with a hollow place where your dearest trait used to be. Cas can feel him flush with pride.

And not for a second, not for the tiniest instant, not while sleeping or running or praying, does Cas stop feeling Cas.

He wants more than any of them will, and more than any of them can understand. He wants a thousand conflicting things, each more selfish than the last. Most of all, he wants to stop wanting.

“That’s not the point,” Dean says in a half-whisper, his muscles coiled tight with tension.

“Then what is?” Cas chokes out

Dean adjusts his grip on his self-fashioned spear. “I don’t know, but I know it’s not that.”

 

***  
There’s food here, though it’s hard to find. They don’t have to eat. They don’t get any thinner, but they do get hungrier.

Biting into a raspberry is the oddest pleasure he’s ever experienced. Here, pleasures are limited to pissing and sleeping when they get time to do either. The tart, sweet pleasure of food nearly overwhelms him for a second.

They’ve learned now. The sun is bright, and the illogical assortment of trees are thinning as they trek higher upwards. At night, they sleep. No matter what sounds they hear, or what creatures they feel, they sleep. In the day they climb.

“We can’t go down,” Cas had told him, and when Dean had asked him why, he had shuddered, and Dean had felt it in his bones.

“What’s at the top?”

Cas had looked only slightly less displeased at the prospect.

Now, Cas bites into an apple that they had found a few hours back. It’s sweet and juicy and Dean’s stomach still constricts with hunger. The tip of the mountain seems no closer than it ever had.

Dean remembers Hell. Remembers Cas’ Hell, on the fringes of his awareness. Remembers the heat and the pain and this place is all at once better and worse.

What the things that live here crave, he craves. What they think, he thinks. What they feel, he feels.

And every second that these monstrous creatures rip him apart brain cell by brain cell, he knows that what they want and what he wants are so insatiably similar. And every minute that he feels something that isn’t him, he realizes that it is. That he is no different. And that the lust and fear and jealousy that drives him makes him like the things he kills.

***  
At night, Dean dreams.

Cas says he doesn’t, but he’s there with Dean. Dean thinks that Cas just doesn’t understand the difference between sleeping and waking, because Dean sometimes forgets the difference himself.

In his dream they are gods. They know everything, and, in the soft certainty of dreams, they don’t question it.

It isn’t what Cas thought he had, once. It isn’t what Dean would have imagined. It is pulling patterns out of the raging chaos. It is peaks and valleys of conflict, dying stars and splitting atoms. It is nothing for infinity, and finite glimpses of something, climbing out of the vacuum and eventually falling right back in.

It is helplessness because even though with each breath they can change the world, they are still themselves, broken and small and marred by their own actions. They are still biased, flawed, tiny creatures, who can crush a continent in their well-meaning fist. They are themselves magnified and wizened, but nothing else.

Cas says he doesn’t dream but he knows what Dean is talking about. And he wants that power, even knowing what it is. He wants it and in the back of his mind, there is still something that tells him that he deserves it.

This desire is wound so tightly with his anger. Somewhere in him, he believes that the world does not even deserve him. That the world abandoned him.

That he was abandoned.

Somewhere in him, the anger pushes back the weakness and the fear and the love.

***  
Fighting in this place is different, and much, much harder.

There are two Deans in front of him, with identical looks of fear and apprehension. And who they are blurs. His thoughts are Dean’s, and Dean’s thoughts are his, and both are the shapeshifter’s.

Identical voices beg at him. They prod and cajole and insist, in equal measure, that they are the real Dean.

Cas holds the handle of the silver knife and stares each, in turn, in the eye. He breathes in, and feels.

He feels the first Dean. He feels the strength of his will, like a wall, pushing against him. Feels the honesty and courage. Feels the earnestness of his hope and the strength of his convictions. Cas feels a beaten saviour.

And the second Dean. He feels the second Dean. He feels him crumbling and scrabbling to hold on to what he is. Feels his self falling away from the centre. Feels the uncertainty and the fear.

He takes the broken Dean by the hand.

“Trust me,” this Dean says, his voice cracking.

And Cas does.

 

\-----

At the top of the mountain they find a fountain.

It’s a dinky looking thing, small and shabby, in the middle of a grassy field. It barely comes up to Dean’s waist. White paint is peeling off of the ceramic underbelly, and large chips are missing from the basin. But the water looks clean and pure, pouring out into the forked river below it.

All they can hear is the flow of the water into the stream. Dean collapses on his knees into the grass.

They lay there for a while, the two of them, on their backs, eyes closed against the bright light of the sun. It’s quiet. True quiet. Dean is calm and blank, thinking of nothing but the cool, hard ground.

Castiel brushes his thumb lightly against a burn on Dean’s hand, head turned to the side and ear pressed into the grass. He hums in dissatisfaction.

Dean laughs and laughs and laughs, and Cas looks at him with wide eyes.

“God,” Dean says, “what now?”

Cas takes a deep breath, feeling clean and alone. “Up,” he says. “Always up. We have to go up.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“It can’t be worse,” Cas says.

“What? Heaven?” Dean asks. “I disagree. I very much disagree.”

“We might find help.”

“We might not.”

“Ready?” Cas asks.

“Not just yet,” Dean says. “Not quite yet.”

“What do you want?”

The streams babble and rush, lapping against the shore. The softest, lightest breeze blows through the grass, their fingers, their hair. Cas can hear Dean’s breath, just barely. He can see Dean’s chest move up and down, feel his fingers against his own.

“Just this, for now,” Dean says. “Please.”

Cas nods and closes his eyes.


End file.
